I have recently needed to access and work on a remote PC from my Mac but the connection had to go via the net. Microsoft have had a RDC (Remote Desktop Connection) client for the Mac for quite some time (Version 1.0.3) and it works OK but even at the highest possible tweek factor the whole thing was really laggy.

Enter the Beta version of RDC For Mac 2.0, which was working brilliantly on the Beta 2 version, almost non-existent lag, all shiny and leopardised, plenty of new options to play with, it worked a treat.

However, the latest version, (Beta 3 who’d a guessed!), is totally broken for UK keyboard setups. In the remote session the Alt key, once pressed, acted as if it was stuck down, Shift+Arrow would act like delete and other whacky effects.

After a bit of digging it turns out that ONLY the US Keyboard layout is supported at the moment, why that changed from Beta 2 is a mystery but there you go.

So without further ado, this solution worked on my UK keyboard with Vista Ultimate, OS X 10.5.2 and RDC Beta 3, it may work other non-us keyboards/setups as well, I have no idea, I have not tested it, if your machines blow up it’s not my fault!

Try setting your keyboard layouts on both Mac and PC to U.S., # can then be accessed by Shift+3. This stops the Shift+Arrow madness and ‘sticky’ Alt key problems

On the Mac:

1. Add US keyboard (System Preferences > International >Input Menu > Check U.S.

2. Check show input menu in menu bar

3. Click the UK Flag and Select the US Flag

On the PC:

1. Add US Keyboard (Control Panel > Regional & Language Options > Keyboards and Languages > Change Keyboard > Add > English (United States)

2. Show The Language Bar

3. Select English (United States)

The final result then pretty much matches the Apple Keyboard layout and the # symbol can be obtained with Shift+3 instead of Alt+3, however the £ sign can only be accessed by Alt+(NumPad)0163

Hope that helps

Simon

1 Comments

pizza July 04, 2008	This also works for the new RDC 2.0 final release and Dutch (Nederlands). Just put the PC config on Nederlands and should work right away! Yippie

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